Broken Mirrors
by Cael Fenton
Summary: A Jedi Master grieves.


**Author's note**: This vignette was inspired by a beautiful fanart sketch by the talented **Jurious** that depicted Jedi Master Dooku at his former Padawan's funeral called _Weep For The Boy...If The Tears Will Come_. Anakin is shown in the foreground, Master Dooku in the mid-ground, and a sketchy figure in the background with his back turned I took to be Obi-Wan. As I wrote, the prose deviated quite a bit from having Anakin as the main focus as he was in the drawing, but otherwise I have tried to illustrate to the best of my rather limited ability the emotions I felt looking at her sketch.

**Disclaimer**: All recognisable characters are property of LucasFilm. **Serenn**, Dooku's forename, belongs to **Jurious**, and I am using it with her permission. Most grateful I am for her generosity.

**BROKEN MIRRORS**

The tall man stood quietly in a corner of the room. It was night. He watched the ash cooling in the final flicks of flame—his eyes glinted almost maliciously in the wheezy moonlight that trickled reluctantly into the room like the last few drops of summer rain squeezed from a filthy kitchen rag.

It was all very self-indulgent, these funerals and other such ceremonies. Vainglory. It was not the way of the Jedi.

But one grows old. He was already seventy-three. As he had done all too often in the past, Serenn Dooku indulged Qui-Gon, painfully aware that he was really indulging himself. So he was standing staring fixedly at the scattered, smouldering cinders, fragments of pale bone and the crumbling pile of ash he was supposed to believe was Qui-Gon Jinn. It was laughable, really, when one had had the time and opportunity to properly mull over the whole issue. Laughable! And he was supposed to be grieving…

He frowned. The mystery deepened, and the broken mirrors that walled him in seemed to further splinter. 'I'm indulging you,' he whispered. 'Would you know if—' His husky voice, uncharacteristically thin and reedy, caught on a thorn inside of him. Of course Qui-Gon would know—he was no longer here, he was _there_. 'Does that make me less of a Jedi?'

_Does that darkness grow?_

Serenn was not a coward. It had simply not occurred to him to say _Sith_, just as an honest shepherd child of the Dune Sea would not cry _Tusken_ if there was nothing threatening his banthas. Not to say, though, that the word had not been mooted in the incongruent spaces of silence whose threshold he did not care to cross. He was much praised for his oratory skill and fiery charisma—words were his gift; they were all he had, after all, to fend off the lonely hunter that moved in the moonlight outside.

He took one step toward the pyre, and, like Obi-Wan Kenobi at the other end of the room, raised his brown woollen hood over his head. The coarse fibres of that old Jedi robe were trapped under the man' pale, well-kept cuticles—irritably, he scrubbed his fingernails against his thumb, and the dark strands fell into inky obscurity outside the smothered glow of Qui-Gon's ashes.

He had come to Naboo as soon he heard the news—literally. He was going through his D5 starfighter's post-touchdown checklist when Master Yoda had commuted the news to him, and he had immediately abandoned post-flight procedures, ignored the usually obligatory pre-flight preparations, vaulted into the ship's cockpit, and come to Naboo. Straight from grueling Togorian negotiations, dirty, hungry, exhausted, and feeling more keenly than ever the weight of his seventy-three years, he had come.

He had been confronted with a cold glare of barely concealed hostility from Obi-Wan Kenobi at an overcrowded mortuary in Theed.

'Master Dooku,' greeted Obi-Wan with frigid courtesy. 'Unexpected to see you here so soon, to say the least…A pleasant surprise amidst these dark times.'

It was clear the young man was spoiling for a fight.

Refusing to rise to the bait, Dooku had rejoined, 'Not so. Qui-Gon was once my Padawan, after all: I came as soon as I heard—' He had watched Obi-Wan's grimy, roughly stubbled jaw go tight.

He had looked on the man—dead—and recalled the slender boy with spare, bony limbs that at first seemed to small, too diminutive to fill the role of _the_ hero, even a baby hero, young protector and saviour of all the shining worlds that spun between the stars. The one lying in front of him was still; his face was contentment. Had Qui-Gon found his rest?

Once, when he was about twelve or thirteen years old, Master Yoda had pointed out to him a pair of sparring eighteen-year-olds. He had told the young Jedi apprentice, in not as few words—and the top right corner of Serenn's upper lip twitched at the memory of that lesson—that the greatest Jedi were still; always, at rest, their lives one long meditative contemplation of the Force, and that it was all the rest that moved. Serenn had taken that to heart. He had carried that early lesson for a long time. It served him well—until he met Qui-Gon Jinn. The boy had been consumed with a fiery restlessness, a fierce searching, a hunger that plagued him all his life. He would never admit to anyone, least of all Qui-Gon, that he had probably learned as much from the apprenticeship as had his Padawan.

The boy had grown. And grown, and grown, and grown. He was tall in a way different from his Master, whose dark cloak hung easily around him, and whose height, albeit intimidating, seemed a shortcut to the dark heart of the mystery. Qui-Gon was not, though, uncomfortable—the lightsaber that hung at his left hip was his life, and he had eventually grown into its elegant form, despite the countless times his long-suffering Master had had to request Temple stores for a yet larger pair of boots, or one of the extra-long sleepcouches usually kept for Wookiee Jedi.

No, never let it be said that Qui-Gon Jinn should not have been a Jedi. He was simply too big for the role; he filled it so many times over; it would not contain him, it _should_ not contain him. The Order was not worthy of Qui-Gon; indeed there were many whose—whose what, exactly?—Who wasted and then died, stunted within its confines. And he knew it was not vanity to count himself among them. A tiny paroxysm of silent rage shook his consciousness, and he shuddered.

He had granted the heft of physical release to the deep, red, painstakingly banked fire in his marrow and bones all too visibly, it turned out. Even as hotly suffused bitterness seared his muscles and flexed his long fingers convulsively in the enormous and microscopic movements of a strong, keen-eyed man suddenly and unexpectedly struck with blindness, Obi-Wan Kenobi turned to him. One step closer. Two steps. Three. Another, another…And suddenly, Qui-Gon's third and last Padawan was almost next to him. Master Dooku blinked once. It had taken Obi-Wan all of two heartbeats to cross the floor of the cremation chamber. And part pale chapped lips—an astonishing flash of paternity here caught the older man by as much surprise as a well-placed bucket of water balanced atop a door left ajar would have: when had the younger last had something to drink?—to ask, 'Are you…cold?'

When Master Dooku made no response, Obi-Wan half-raised an arm in a vague gesture that crudely encompassed the open-air crematorium, and the cool dark Nubian night that arced serenely overhead, and repeated, 'Do you feel chilly, Master?'

Dooku's vacant gaze, listless with unspoken disquiet, turned upward. But he saw no stars, only the persistently clinging pall of smoke from Qui-Gon's pyre. 'I'm not your Master,' he said tiredly. 'He is.' Too late his unfocused stare snapped back to earth, passing briefly over the dead Jedi Master's lightsaber that hung now at Obi-Wan's left hip; too late he recalled Yoda's words to him several hours before the cremation ceremony, 'Wish to take young Anakin Skywalker as Padawan, Knight Kenobi does.'

'Knight Kenobi, Master?'

'Feel that ready and worthy he is, the Council does.'

Serenn had shaken his head in bewilderment at Master Yoda's apparent lack of concern. 'Obi-Wan Kenobi has just had all…He's in shock—he's…' He had stopped. He didn't know Qui-Gon's Padawan all that well. And yet every fibre of his being wanted to know if that sudden responsibility of full manhood had been Obi-Wan's choice.

As though reading his mind, Yoda had said, 'Still unsure I am whether Qui-Gon's wish this is, or Obi-Wan's.'

Serenn had felt suddenly cold. No matter what the Code preached of life beyond death and of blissful, absolute union with the Force, Qui-Gon's death should have been an end. The falling of a curtain, the closing of a book. The darkening of a bright strand of space-time in the Force. Yet he had the uneasy feeling it was a beginning, merely a portent of more death, as though Qui-Gon's death sentence—passed by the High Council's indifference and executed by the mysterious tattooed Sith—was the first blot staining the unhappy, troubled galaxy as it hung suspended, slowly revolving about its dark heart in the infinite emptiness of space, and that the inkwell teetered on edge, about to topple and spill the rest of its obliterative contents over everything he knew and held dear.

His mind turned to Qui-Gon, to sketchy memories, vivid memories, happy ones and sad ones, the tragic, the comic—the crazily slanted, poignantly tender, violently passionate, hastily scrawled language of their eleven years together. Eleven years passed him, relived, before he had enough time to finish drawing breath for a word of protest. But his recollection of the past formed words enough for him_: Master, the Force is speaking now. Listen to the now, to the Living Force._

And why, pray tell, was that so important, he questioned his memory, just as he had so often questioned one midnight-eyed young man in his charge. This midnight-eyed young man had replied, _Beauty can be found in the least likely of places_. As he must have very often repeated to Obi-Wan Kenobi. To Qui-Gon, beauty was in the eye of the beholder. Was there, then, any chance of objectively disserting the grubby-cheeked, snub-nosed, golden-haired child Qui-Gon had, after his usual fashion, seemed to have miraculously pulled out of Tatooine's desert winds, so searingly hot that they shimmered as they howled and whistled over the burning sand in the blaze of the afternoon suns? Probably not. Master Dooku recalled the famous words of the Alderaanian poet Elanno Domi_, 'Historians dream up history far more than they observe and record it,'_ something Qui-Gon had once quoted to his Master. He eyed Obi-Wan, who had not changed his position next to him. You unfeeling, heartless, disloyal, unthinking beast!—casting your Padawan into this, he shouted into the deafening silence surrounding him. Yet even as those words exploded in his brain, he knew he could never attach any real meaning to them, not when they were directed against Qui-Gon Jinn.

'Where is the boy?' And his voice was as he wanted it to be, deep and strong as it had been fifty years ago.

'I sent him to sleep a little. He is tired.'

'Ah.' Serenn looked at the fire, which by now could barely be qualified as such, in its death throes. Orange light, and solferino, mingled, seemed to him now soft and warm, gentle and yielding, a vivid contrast to the fierce destructive entity he had earlier that night seen viciously, hungrily devouring the mortal shell of his former Padawan with savage abandon, much like how the Sith must have torn Qui-Gon Jinn from that same mortal shell. Qui-Gon held life with such a gently teasing love that it was impossible to imagine it taken from him with anything but violent force. He had been avenged by Obi-Wan Kenobi—yes, _avenged_ was the word. The image of those young-old, green-grey eyes with the bleeding, bruised, tattered, sore, red, weeping and multiply contused remnants of a death-dealing angel's hard-edged fury haunted the Master's subconscious mind. Dooku's gaze flicked back to Obi-Wan. The young man's eyes were half-closed. He was exhausted, and no wonder. Master Dooku continued to look at Obi-Wan, trying to think dispassionately.

'You have every right to be angry at him.' He was going to add _It's only natural, Obi-Wan_, but he bit down on the words.

'Anakin?' queried Obi-Wan, willfully misunderstanding.

Was it possible that Dooku, at that moment, smiled? His dark eyes beheld the emotion that filled the room: his quiescent, raging, delicate, powerful, reticent, intense, giving, possessive, caring, jealous anger that rattled the cage of himself. Qui-Gon would have called it love. Suddenly he felt a kind of kinship with Obi-Wan Kenobi, a strange link that transcended the vastness of—everything—the gulf that opened its shoreless dark maw between them. And the ghost of Qui-Gon Jinn **(1)** hovered between them so that Serenn could at last recognise Obi-Wan as Qui-Gon's Padawan.

His head felt heavy, as though with the weight of the galaxy.

_You have very many long shadows to outshine_.

His hands seemed to shake; his head spun. How the Jedi Order and he each grated and elbowed and scraped and stepped on the toes of the other! In all the Temple's wide rooms, its sunlit corridors and spacious gathering halls, there was not room enough for the thirteen persons of the High Council and himself. To be a Jedi, a Jedi—it had once been all he ever wanted. How could one more death have changed all that? One more death, a new death, one more death in all his long lonely years of death and more death. Life was a magnificent mockery, that he knew. Even the stars had darkened within this lifetime.

And with that, he was alone again, the link snapped, the connection beyond repair, and all the love and affection and pride, everything he had ever truly _felt_, was cut away to a disfigured black stump. He was already gone, surely, beyond redemption. There was nothing for him here. His Padawan was dead, and with the falling of the Sith's red blade on Qui-Gon's light and life, his former Master had betrayed his faith once too many times.

Serenn lifted his gaze to the pyre to look at Qui-Gon one last time. Then he averted his eyes.

**FINIS**

**(1)** I hope you didn't take this phrase literally.


End file.
